Zeno X Gallery is proud to announce its participation to Frieze London. A fine selection of works by artists of the gallery will be on view. For the first time we present work by Grace Schwindt.
Grace Schwindt (°1979) is a German artist who is living and working almost for ten years in London. She is currently participating in the Wiels artist-in-residence programme in Brussels. Her artistic practice exist of live performances, films, videos, drawing and sculptures. Her artworks explore aspects of (German) history, emphazing social relations and ensuing questions associated with the witnessing and narrating of historical events. We bring a special presentation of ‘Tenant’ (2012), a film which had already a screening this year at the Whitechapel in London and Wiels, Brussels. The work was first on view at Collective Gallery in Edinburgh, who commissioned the work together with Film London Artists Moving Image Network.
In the artist’s own words the film “describes the routines that take place in a family home, such as eating together, doing homework or bathing. These routines are embedded into a wider historical and social context and get repeatedly interrupted, for example, by a performer falling down stairs at the very moment she reached the top. The body in my work is turned into a fragile prop and in constant danger. I wish to empty institutionalized spaces of meaning. However, this doesn’ t lead to neutrality, but becomes again loaded with gender, age, class and race … I generally use theatrical sets for video and performance works with minimal architectural elements and props to mark a location. I place bodies in these spaces, including my own, and use a tightly scripted choreography, in which every move relates to institutionalized systems that rely on exclusion and destruction. I investigate how social relations and understandings about oneself are formed in such a systems. Interviews that I conduct with individuals often serve as a starting point for fictionalized dialogues that are then delivered by different performers. Whilst trying to represent a system, I continuosly deconstruct it by using the same mechanisms that I apply to build it: bodies, movements, speech, furniture, architecture and costumes.”
In ‘Tenant’ the family home becomes the stage to re-enact a scripted dialogue that takes as a starting point a story about Mrs. Schumacher who was the Lodger of the artist’s grandfather in Berlin during the Second World War. She was a communist and helped Vladimir Lenin travel from Switzerland to Russia in 1917 after the February Revolution broke out. The relationship between language and physical movements explores roles that these two elements play in the creation of knowledge and social relations.
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